Content Matters

For those of you who may have missed last week's SIIA panel on widgets (or those who were there and want to relive the moment), the team at Scribe Media has made a video version available here.

The video includes the full panel discussion and Q&A.  The panel featured three panelists:

• Steve Touhill, VP, Business Development for Clearspring
• Alex Iskold, Founder and CEO, AdaptiveBlue
• Jeff Yolen, Chief Marketing Officer for Sphere

My summary of the panel discussion can be found here.  Alex Iskold provided an in-depth summary on the AdaptiveBlue blog.

Earlier today, I had the opportunity to serve as moderator for a fascinating panel at the SIIA Brown Bag.  The panel, Think Small: Why Widgets are the Next Big Thing for Content Distribution, featured three terrific speakers:

• Steve Touhill, VP, Business Development for Clearspring
• Alex Iskold, Founder and CEO, AdaptiveBlue
• Jeff Yolen, Chief Marketing Officer for Sphere

The panel began with an discussion of why widgets are emerging as an important vehicle for the content industry.  While Web 1.0 was led by the "Field of Dreams" approach to creating massive portals, Web 2.0 is focused on personalization of content.  Users don't want to use your site; instead, they want to take your content, arrange it with other content of their choosing, customize the look and feel, comment on it and share it with others.

The discussion quickly moved to monetization, where the panelists discussed the various business models (sponsorship, eCommerce/affiliate programs and advertising).  Alex Iskold described how the AdaptiveBlue widgets allowed bloggers to use their affiliate accounts for Amazon and others to generate revenues.  All agreed that it was very early and the monetization models were just being established,
although Google's announcement yesterday of its Gadget Ads should accelerate adoption of that model.

Jeff Yolen walked through the Sphere model, which is more of a pull than push.  While most widgets are used to push content out to users, the "Sphere It" widget is used on content provider sites to pull other relevant content in, improving the user experience.

The panelists agreed that one challenge with widgets is getting them discovered.  There were more than 3,000 Facebook apps launched in the first two months after their platform was launched; catalogs from Google and Netvibes are similarly overrun.

According to Steve Touhill, the most successful models for widget distribution have been those that include the widget inline with their other content (as the NBA does with player cards) and the "grab it" functionality that most widgets offer, which fosters viral growth.

The strong turnout and many questions posed reinforced that widgets are on the minds of content industry professionals.  While the business models may take another 6-12 months to work out, it looks as though widgets will be an important component of any content strategy.

My key takeaways from the discussion were:

1. The content model on the web is shifting from the comprehensive portal to the personalized page where the user controls the selection and arrangement of content.

2. Widgets can be an effective way to increase brand awareness, drive advertising sponsorship and for eCommerce/affiliate marketing.
3. It's already getting crowded out there and it's hard to get notice for your "widgets in the wild".  Making your widget playful is key for viral adoption.
4. We're still in the early days of widgets; if you're blogging or have a Facebook page, start experimenting with widgets.  If you don't have one, create a Facebook page and spend an hour per week on it.  Your future might depend on it.

Here's Alex Iskold's take on the panel on the AdaptiveBlue blog.

Were you at the brown bag?  Add your thoughts in the comments.

I've written previously of the challenges that the scientific community has had in shifting to an open publishing approach for scientific research.

Companies such as Public Library of Science, Nature and others have been exploring these models, but take up has been slow.

My assumption has always been that the biggest obstacle to these models have been the efforts by the traditional publishers to thwart them.  And while those efforts have certainly been extensive, it seems that part of the problem is that the tenure and promotion system used by universities may discourage faculty from using the newer approaches.

That's the finding of a new study conducted by Greenhouse Associates on behalf of the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication.  The study, of University faculty, determined that while faculty expressed a desire for change to the system, they continued to use the traditional journals for publishing their research.

A summary of the study can be found at Alacra's new Research Recap site.  The full study is available on the OSC website.

Alacra today announced the introduction of Research Recap, a new website which showcases compelling new research reports.  Built on a blogging platform, Research Recap tracks credit and equity research; market research; economic research; academic research; as well as research from professional services organizations, think tanks and governmental sources.

The idea behind Research Recap is to foster information discovery.  Users typically rely upon a handful of providers for research and miss huge volumes of information that may be critical to them. 

Reports on Research Recap are tagged by the topics they cover, making it easy to identify research a user is interested in.  RSS feeds allow users to quickly scan each day’s content, to identify what’s most critical for them.

The research profiled on Research Recap is predominantly free, with links provided to the underlying research. 

If you have content which you would like considered for inclusion in Research Recap, you can learn more about submitting your research here.

Widgets are hot!

This Thursday (September 20), I'll be moderating a Panel entitled "Think Small: Why Widgets are the Next Big Thing for Content Syndication" at the SIIA brown bag lunch.  The panel features three terrific speakers:

• Jeff Yolen, Chief Revenue Officer for Sphere
• Alex Iskold, Founder and CEO, AdaptiveBlue
• Steve Touhill, VP, Business Development, Clearspring

The panel will explore the impact of the deportalization of the Internet and the growth of social networks and other web 2.0 platforms.  While traditional portals followed the Field of Dreams approach to content, the new model requires content syndication and the development of widgets for content dissemination.

Full details on the SIIA brown bag are available here.  I hope to see you there.

Earlier this week, Business Week reported that the U.S. division of Reed Elsevier has hired lobbyist Barbour Griffith & Rogers to lobby the federal government.  The high-powered lobby shop was founded by Republican stalwart Haley Barbour, now Governor of Mississippi.  When Barbour was elected Governor, the firm was sold to the Interpublic Group of Companies, and counts among its clients former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi.

According to the registration form filed with the Senate last week, the firm has been hired  "for strategic counsel and to provide advice on policy issues important to the publishing and information industries".

While there are many policy issues facing content companies these days, I'm wondering if Reed Elsevier is specifically looking to challenge efforts by Carl Malamud to break down the protective gates that prevent access to case law.  That market today is in effect a duopoly, with Lexis and Thomson West the primary sources.  Malamud's efforts to challenge those barriers was profiled in a John Markoff New York Times article a few weeks ago.

For those who might dismiss Malamud's efforts, it's helpful to recall that he, almost singlehandedly, forced the SEC to make corporate filings available online (EDGAR); prior to the 1993 decision, SEC filings were provided through exclusive contracts to then LexisNexis parent Mead Data Central.

As Malamud states in the Times article:

"I don’t mind people making billions, but I hate barriers to entry."

There are many compelling arguments to treat case law as public works; just as with SEC and Patent & Trademark filings, there is a cost to society to only allowing access to those with resources.  And while it's clear that Lexis and West would fight such an effort, in the long run, their businesses will succeed or fail based upon the tools they provide to enhance the underlying content, not simply access to the base documents.

The hiring of Barbour Griffith follows the launch of the pseudo-grass roots organization PRISM, of which Elsevier is suspected to be a backer.  It seems that whenever change is on the horizon, the old line content companies turn to their double L approach to Lobby and Litigate.

No posts today.

Some of the newer social networks have looked to leverage your address book to bootstrap your friends list.

A new entrant, Quechup, seems to be taking this to a new level, by auto-spamming your entire address book without the user's knowledge.  I've received a couple of Quechup requests this past week and, since I had little interest in joining yet another social net, quickly Googled the company name and saw thousands of posts equating Quechup with Spam.

There aren't too many things I could think of that would tick off a potential user faster than abusing access to their network.  Quechup appears to be an offering from iDate, a Las Vegas based online dating service, whose shares are traded on the pink sheets.  That's one penny stock that I wouldn't want to own right now. 

For more on the Quechup spam mess, read e-Week or Boing Boing.

Sometimes, the best product ideas are simple.  Numerous content businesses have been launched leveraging publicly available information, with improved functionality or analytics.
An example of this is a new site, Sunday Strategy, currently in beta for the kickoff of the 2007 football season.
 

The team behind Sunday Strategy have compiled a database of point spreads and final results for NFL games for the past seven years.  They've built a compelling front-end which allows users to easily compare various teams' performance vs. the spread with multiple variables such as field surface, home or road team, conference or division opponent and more.  Users can also select various criteria to identify trends.

Want to know how road teams that were at least a 7 point underdog faired playing on grass last year?  Just a few clicks and you can see the results, then drill-down to individual games. 

With billions of dollars wagered each year on NFL games in casinos, online and illegally, this market seems ripe for tools that can help users identify trends.  It's estimated that between $5-7 billion is bet on the Super Bowl alone.

With that focus on point spreads, it's surprising that this data isn't already at your fingertips.  While there are tens of thousands of sites that provide advice on betting, Sunday Strategy seems to provide some unique capabilities, particularly for a free site.  It's just another example of how you can meld widely available information with tools and analytics to create compelling products.

Oh, and those road underdogs I mentioned earlier.  They were 11-39 last year, but 27-21-2 against the spread.

Content and technology industry veteran Randy Marcinko has been named CEO of Groxis, publisher of the Grokker data visualization application.

Randy will also retain his role as CEO of Marcinko Enterprises ("MEI"), a business development consultancy serving the content industry. 

Marcinko brings significant experience in the content and technology industry.  He previously served as CEO of nStein, a provider of tagging and entity extraction.

As I've previously written, data visualization is beginning to take hold.  Mainstream media like the New York Times have adopted tree maps and heat maps as a means of understanding large volumes of data.  Meanwhile, products like Visual Path and new social network visualization apps from LexisNexis and Leadership Directories have used visualization to help show relationships between people.

With Randy as CEO, I expect that Groxis will make a major push to bring data visualization to the content industry.  Visualization can be an effective way to drive navigation and discovery and allows content providers to deliver new applications for their content.

Widgets are becoming increasingly important, as part of the continued  deportalization of the Internet.  Widgets allow the easy syndication of content to blogs, social networks like Facebook or MySpace and other web sites.  While only a handful of content providers have yet deployed widgets for delivery of their content, it’s a topic that’s getting a lot of mindshare among the content community.

I’ve been asked to moderate a panel on widgets at the SIIA’s next brown bag luncheon (Sept 20) in New York, entitled Think Small: Why Widgets are the Next Big Thing for Content Distribution.  Panelists will discuss how they are using widgets to drive traffic, create unique advertising or sponsorship opportunities and sell content.

We’re still finalizing the speaker list, but the preliminary details are posted on the SIIA site.  The brown bags are always a great networking opportunity as well, so if you plan to be in NYC on the 20th, I’d encourage you to sign up while there are still open slots. 

Hope to see you there.